I am back from last week’s MarketingSherpa Email Summit ‘07 – it was fab, and my idea of heaven: 24/7 talk of email, cuban food – and all done in sunny, warm (26° C/ 79° F) Miami. Only those living in a cold, wet climate such as Ireland can appreciate the importance of those two words, ’sunny’ and ‘warm’.

One of the best presentations I attended was given by Cindy Brown, CEO & Founder of Blue Moon Works – “Integrating Mobile + Email Marketing”. It was ‘best’ because it was so timely and practical. It’s still early days, but I feel strongly that we need to start addressing the rendering challenges of handheld devices – particularly in the B2B sector.

B2B because, as Cindy pointed out, business travellers were amongst the first adopters, and continue to lead in usage. I did a little digging around for ownership/usage figures. Even several years ago, Vodafone UK found that more then 80% of business professionals were equipped for mobile working. Numbers using? In the UK, Ofcom reported that as of March 2005 there were 61.1 million mobile subscriptions. eTForecast predicts by 2008 there’ll be an estimated 58 million PDA-Phone/Smartphones sold worldwide – Western Europe represents 19% of that figure. This article lists the most popular mobile phones in Europe.

Anyway, here are just a few of the practical tips she gave us:

• As in the early days of the web browser, the early versions of mobile browsers are unforgiving with code.
• Have a text link at the top of your newsletter. (With the issues raised by the preview panes and image blockings, you should already be doing this.)
• Have a call to action geared towards this sector: Make the phone number a live link so the person viewing it can use their device to make a call right then and there. (Kind of like the advice in the very early days of email – make your email address a live link.)
• Test! Here’s a website where you can see how your newsletter is rendering in handhelds: Skweezer. Apparently the latest version of Opera offers the ability to view rendering as well.

Updated 3 April: Check out Mark Brownlow’s blog with further information about email and handhelds.

Posted on March 14th, 2007 under Email Marketing, HTML email newsletters, e-newsletter deliverability .
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